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Salesforce makes the case that the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) plays/will play a critical, central role in helping organizations become “customer companies” in the age of the connected customer. Saleforce brings much needed substance to its Marketing Cloud, which previously was comprised primarily of the Radian6 social media intelligence platform. This allows Salesforce to tell a much more complete story when it comes to delivering on the vision of empowering customer-centric organizations.
Salesforce’s exultation of the CMO is a good thing for Marketing, which has at times been maligned as the logo, hats, pens, and PowerPoint template folks. I hope this focus can serve as a catalyst for marketing having better conversations within the organization, perhaps reducing the need to explain why this customer stuff is so important.
Pardot, the B2B marketing automation engine that Salesforce acquired as part of ExactTarget, doesn’t “live” in the Marketing Cloud (though former Pardot CEO Adam Blitzer discussed it in the Marketing Cloud Keynote), but is rather part of the Sales Cloud. This could point to stronger integration between marketing and sales processes (i.e. lead handoff, closed loop reporting, etc.). That may well be the case, but Salesforce’s introduction of this functionality during the main keynote was discordant in which the Pardot functionality was described as the “marketing assistant” to sales. This positioning doesn’t just subtly undermine the marketing-sales relationship but truly misses the point about the vital role marketing now plays in shaping the buyer’s vision and developing sales-ready opportunities. I believe strongly that Marketing must be sales- and revenue-focused, but in the best-performing firms, the relationship is one of partnership. As Salesforce pivots towards the CMO, they’ll need to follow their own advice and become more customer centric, at least as far as the marketer is concerned.
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The key sentence: "As Salesforce pivots towards the CMO, they’ll need to follow their own advice and become more customer centric, at least as far as the marketer is concerned."
Pardot should be a part of the Marketing Cloud, but I think this has more to do with the current Pardot/SFDC integration than anything else (especially the DB sharing). Regardless, MA is the domain of Marketing for many, many reasons, and to Aberdeen's point, it's a partnership between Marketing and Sales.